HOCUS Rising star Jan Burke -- whom reviewers have consistently compared to Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton, and Robert Parker -- pulls out all the stops in her most powerful work to date. In this thunderously paced heart stopper, intrepid sleuth/reporter Irene Kelly is put to the test when her detective husband is taken hostage. Tension mounts from the first pages when Irene's detective husband, Frank Harriman, turns up missing, a bloodstain is found in the trunk of his car, and an ominous warning is left on the rearview mirror suggesting he's been kidnapped. Burke never lets up the pressure, skillfully raising the suspense to a rolling boil by the end of this wild and exciting ride.  "Hocus" delivers the same intricate plotting, clever dialogue, and gobbledown prose readers have come to expect from Jan Burke, but she now exceeds already high expectations in her strongest book yet.